This is the fifth 'significant' earthquake (signif. being 6.5+) since the beginning of this year and we have'nt passed a fortnight yet. I'm going to check up at USGS as i have an interest in following quakes.

Haiti is the most impoverished nation in the Western world; I think years and years of war, disease, and the lack of a truly sovereign government and Hurricane after Hurricane destroying everything year after year are more worrying than this.

The recent 6.5 Earthquake is Cali didn't do much damage, at least it wasn't a big story on the news.

This one is devastating.

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That's because in California they have been building structures to be earthquake resistant for over 70 years. In Haiti the homes are often little more than log cabins or adobe type huts. In an earthquake the resonance breaks apart mud or adobe huts. Same thing happend in that Turkish earthquake many years ago.

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this post got me to thinking about something I heard on the radio around New Years. I was soaking in the tub listening to Coast to Coast AM (as I frequently do on cold winters nights) when they had a guest on on one of the predictions shows. He said that the same energy that caused the massive quake in Indonesia
(and the subsiquent tsunomi) was going to be present this year. I am now wondering if prehaps this earthquake, along with the Cali earthquake, is a warning (if you will) of things to come in 2010.

i fear the absolute worst...they say bodies are "already lining the streets of the capital" (and they have barely even been able to dig out maybe 3% of the rubble so far, and this is just in Port-Au-Prince alone.

if you look at this construction in Port-Au-Prince in just a very small part of a citty that calls 2 million home, you can imagine the total disaster that we may see unfold :frown1:

i cannot imagine that any of those would stay up, and most would collapse on top of each other in those sections as seen in the first photo...

obviously the time of day (late afternoon) may be crucial too...if people were arriving home, or in offices and buildings at the time, it would make the disaster even worse...thank goodness it was not at night, when everyone is home in these structures.

and nobody probably is able to reach or know the extent of the damage to the interior of the country and the 7 million others living throughout...

i am sure all the hospitals have collapsed and been destroyed...i shudder to think how many of an already sick and unhealthy population will now die due to the destruction of the already inadequate health systems.

this is going to be absolutely horrific when we see its full scope.

like Indonesian Tsunami horrific :frown1:

this may be the only time when living in an earthen type hut outside of town, would have been beneficial. :frown1:

Gold Member

an entire city of 2 million is utterly destroyed...a couple million are homeless... several hundred thousand may be dead...these people have no equipment to dig out, little medical supplies, the support organizations that were there are utterly destroyed and many of them are dead...there is no clean water, no power, no electricity and night will fall soon.

3,000+ dangerous prisoners have escaped from the national penetentiary...

This cant be good news for a people who eat mud pancakes. Some are estimating as many as 500,000 may have died... and that is just from the quake alone. It is very possible disease, exposure and malnutrition can claim more. All natural disasters are terrible, but they are especially terrible when it happens to people in a daily fight for survival as it is.

Gold Member

My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Haiti as well and I am encouraged that the President has promised a prompt U.S. response. Let us hope assistance is immediate.

I am also hopeful that the press in their efforts at getting the information out to the rest of the word, and even in their best of intentions, treat the people of Haiti with the dignity (afforded victims of some disasters past) of not showing to the world pictures of their dead (men women and children) lying in the streets of their shattered towns.

I think too often there is a line that is crossed, between an informative yet respectful handling of those images.